Automated capture of application user interfaces

Can’t you drive the app and capture most of the screens needed for visual context?

Problem

Many app screens providing visual context are acquired in the background as the developer exercises the app in the simulator, but not all. Catalog apps and others can have a large number of screens that are rarely viewed by the developer. Before translating, the developer must navigate to each screen so that the visual context for every string is captured. For large apps, this manual capture of all screens can take a large amount of developer time.

Solution

Each app screen has a variety of user interface elements; buttons, menus, sliders, etc. Frequently these elements cause the display to change or lead to another screen. Automating many user interface activities quickly drives the app through a large portion of the screens, crawling the app similar to how a search engine crawls a web site. It reduces the manual input required from the developer by driving the app interface to quickly capture as many screens and strings as possible. While this technique can not capture every possible screen, because some require user input to be accessed, it can capture the vast majority. The developer can then review the remaining unfound strings and manually navigate through the app interfaces in the simulator to capture any remaining elements.

Impact

Makes the first massive gathering of all the screens and strings for Visual Context much faster, which saves the developer time.